Dana: too young to value it now

On August 8, 1856, Richard Henry Dana, Jr. wrote to his 5-year old son Richard Henry Dana III during his visit to Stratford-Upon-Avon. His letter is dated from "Shakespeare's House":

My Dear Little Richard, —

You are too young to value it now; but, if God spares your precious life, you may, one of these days, look back with pleasure upon a letter addressed to you, by your father, from the very house in which the great Shakespeare was born.

Your affectionate father,
Richd H. Dana, Jr.

"Dear Little Richard" was less literary than his father the novelist or his poet/critic/novelist grandfather Richard Henry Dana, Sr (who, it is worth noting, controversially advocated that Shakespeare was a better writer than Alexander Pope). RHD III did, however, append a chapter to his father's most famous work, the novel Two Years Before the Mast, titled "Seventy-Six Years After." He also became the husband of Edith Longfellow, third daughter of the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. The three generations of Richard Henry Danas posed together for this portrait circa 1875:

Cooper is in town, in ill health

 On April 8, 1851, the poet and critic Richard Henry Dana Sr. wrote a letter to fellow writer William Cullen Bryant. "Cooper is in town, in ill health," he wrote. "When I saw him last he was in high health and excellent spirits. He has grown thin, and has an ashy instead of a florid complexion." Dana met with Cooper on what was the last trip to New York City ever made by the author of The Last of the Mohicans; Cooper died one day shy of his 62nd birthday that fall.

Dana began his correspondence with Cooper just over a decade earlier, initiating a somewhat cold relationship, yet one of mutual respect. As Dana recounted, "I was telling Mr. [Washington] Allston not long ago, how very highly I tho't of the Pioneers. 'Why don't you write Mr. Cooper?' asked he." So he did.

Shortly after this initial contact, Dana sent Cooper a copy of his son's "journal," as he called it. The work is more generally known as Two Years Before the Mast by Richard Henry Dana, Jr.

Much earlier, Cooper had served before the mast as a midshipman himself. In fact, in the decade or so after Dana Jr.'s book, Cooper wrote more and more about life at sea — both in fiction and nonfiction. Up to his death, he had been working on a continuation of his 1839 book on Naval history. The second part of History of the Navy of the United States of America was published posthumously in incomplete form.

Dana and a "select company"

In his journal entry for December 16, 1854, Richard Henry Dana, Jr. noted his dinner plans. The author of Two Years Before the Mast, a novel published in 1840, was among a "select company" that included Ralph Waldo Emerson, James Russell Lowell, A. Bronson Alcott, and a young Franklin Benjamin Sanborn. Presumably with restraint, he concluded, "It was very agreeable."

Of Emerson, Dana recorded he was "a gentleman, never bores or preaches or dictates... and has even skill and tact in managing his conversation." He said the same of Alcott and noted, "it is quite surprising to see these transcendentalists appearing well as men of the world."

Perhaps more interesting, however, is that all these gentlemen were anti-slavery men. Dana himself had only recently defended the fugitive Anthony Burns in a trial meant to challenge the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. Dana also paired with Robert Morris, an African-American lawyer; their efforts, however, were unsuccessful.

Emerson was a strong voice against slavery in the 1850s through his speeches; Lowell used his pen. For a short time, he edited an apolitionist newspaper in Pennsylvania but focused his poetic voice on the cause in poems like "The Present Crisis" and "On the Capture of Fugitive Slaves Near Washington." Alcott hosted at least one man escaped from enslavement in his Concord home years earlier and was part of a crowd that attempted to free Anthony Burns from a Boston courthouse. Dana referred to the young Sanborn, then a Harvard student, as "clever and promising." Only a few years later, Sanborn funded the radical abolitionist John Brown in his raid on Harper's Ferry as a member of the so-called "Secret Six."

Dana: the day fixed upon for the sailing

The problem with maritime narratives, wrote Richard Henry Dana, Jr., is that they are usually written by officers, "gentlemen 'with his gloves on'." So, Dana told his own story, describing his two years as a sailor "before the mast" or "a voice from the forecastle."

The experience that became the subject of his 1840 book Two Years Before the Mast started on August 14, 1834. That day, aboard the brig Pilgrim, Dana left the port of Boston on the way to California. As he described:

The fourteenth of August was the day fixed upon for the sailing of the brig Pilgrim on her voyage from Boston round Cape Horn to the western coast of North America... I had undertaken [the voyage] from a determination to cure, if possible, by an entire change of life, and by a long absence from books and study, a weakness of the eyes, which had obliged me to give up my pursuits, and which no medical aid seemed likely to cure.

The change in young Dana's life was extreme — and sudden. His family was a well-known (and well-off) one. An ancestor, Francis Dana, had been a member of the Continental Congress and Chief Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Court. His father (and namesake) was an accomplished poet, novelist, and somewhat controversial literary critic and editor. Dana, Jr. left the ranks of Harvard students, tossing aside his "tight dress coat, silk cap, and kid gloves" in exchange for "loose duck trowsers, checked shirt and tarpaulin hat of a sailor." Despite his attempts to look like "a jack tar... as salt as Neptune himself," he was soon recognized as a "landsman."

By the end of his voyage, he was a landsman no more. He did not return to Boston until September 1836. Thereafter, his eye troubles did not seem to bother him. Years later, he sailed to Europe with friends — a trip which reinforced how much he loved his own country (though he ultimately died in Rome).

His book about his two years at sea is still moderately well-known. Dana Point, California is named after him. The Pilgrim has been recreated and an annual regatta also celebrates the author.

Dana: intensely interested in my own country

The steamship America left Boston on July 2, 1856 en route to Liverpool. Among the passengers was Richard Henry Dana, Jr., who had spent two years before the mast in the previous decade, traveling ultimately to California. Despite this ample experience at sea, he had never been to Europe. He would stay on foreign soil for only about 41 days.

Two of Dana's companions for the trip were Thomas Gold Appleton, the "prince of rattlers," and William Wetmore Story, who was abandoning the law to study art. The trio talked and told stories, making half-formed plans to co-author a book called Spray from the Paddlebox. Appleton, who was a frequent traveler to Europe and elsewhere, called it "one of the pleasantest passages I have made." Dana described it this way:

We started punctually at twelve, with a most beautiful day overhead and around us... and we went down the harbor in beautiful style — actually bound to Europe, — the Europe of my dreams, that I hardly dared believe I should ever see. But now that the time has come, I am so intensely interested in my own country, in the impending struggle between the free classes and the slave-power that I cannot conjure up a thought of England.

Dana was already a founding member of the Free Soil Party and served as the lawyer defending fugitive slave Anthony Burns. The majority of his career for the next decade after his European trip was devoted to the anti-slavery cause, often serving as a pro bono lawyer for fugitive slaves.

Death of Dana, Jr.

Richard Henry Dana, Jr. died on January 6, 1882. He was 66 years old. Though his career was varied — he was a sailor, a writer, and a lawyer — he is known predominantly from one book: Two Years Before the Mast, published in 1840.

The book was inspired by two years at sea, which the Boston Brahmin took to avoid Harvard temporarily (and with a hope to repair worsening eyesight). Serving as a common sailor rather than taking the European Grand Tour expected of wealthy individuals, he was disturbed by the plight of his fellow seamen. His book, a memoir of his two years on board the Pilgrim, was written to draw attention to the poor conditions at sea. Dana Point in California was named in honor of the author.

Dana continued fighting on land as well. While an undergrad at Harvard, he was suspended for six months for supporting a student protest. After graduating from Harvard Law School, he fought for an eclectic range of clients, including the fugitive slave Anthony Burns.

He also represented doctor William T. G. Morton, who was fighting for official recognition as the discoverer of the anesthetic properties of ether. Interestingly enough, it was a dentist who applied ether to Frances Appleton Longfellow, wife of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, as the first woman to give birth under anesthesia. Her daughter, Fanny Jr., did not survive past infancy. However, another daughter of the Longfellows, "Edith with the golden hair," married Richard Henry Dana III.

Dana Jr. traveled to Rome, Italy, at the end of his life. It was there that he contracted influenza and died in 1882, having outlived his father and namesake, himself a famous poet and critic, by slightly less than three years.